Here’s a cheeky sales pitch for George Clooney‘s new film The Monuments Men, which features Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville, and John Goodman as a crew of art guys and their associates who seek to rescue priceless cultural artifacts from Hitler’s war machine. The ads we’ve seen so far were the conventional sort. Now there’s an ad in the old newsreel style (well, very vaguely in the style), which along with the website SupportTheMonumentsMen.com tells you a bit about the film and the people that inspired it. Read More »

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The Monuments Men, the new film from George Clooney about a group of guys from the art world recruited to save art from the ravages of Hitler’s army, may have been pushed into 2014 to make time for effects work, but we can still get a good look at it now.

There’s a lot of new footage in this trailer, much of it showing off the stellar supporting cast (including Bill Murray, John Goodman,Bob Balaban, and Cate Blanchett for starters) and in so doing supporting the illusion that this is an Ocean’s movie transported to World War II. But there’s probably all first act stuff, and as this trailer goes on there’s a more serious spirit that comes to the fore.

The play August: Osage County was kind of a big deal — the blackly comic family drama won the Pulitzer in ’08. The film version is also garnering a lot of attention, thanks in no small part to the cast. Put Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Ewan McGregor, Benedict Cumberbatch, Abigail Breslin, Sam Shepard, and Chris Cooper in a film together and people are bound to pay attention.

Tonight you can watch a live Q&A with some of the cast (Julia Roberts, Julianne Nicholson, Juliette Lewis, Margo Martindale, Chris Cooper, Dermot Mulroney) and producer George Clooney. Whether you’re interested in the film or not, the live patter between Clooney and Roberts is always entertaining, and the rest of the cast should be able to think on their feet as well to keep the talk lively.

The livestream Q&A begins at 11pm EST / 8pm PST. Watch via the embed (which may not show up before the start time) below. Read More »

Hot off the news Disney has moved Star Wars Episode VII from an expected Summer 2015 release date to the winter, the company has slotted another family sci-fi fantasy adventure in the expected Star Wars slot. Tomorrowland, directed by Brad Bird, co-written by Damon Lindelof and starring George Clooney, has been moved from December 2014 to May 22, 2015.

One of the highlights of each new Oscar season is the set of roundtable discussions created by THR. In each of these, the trade gathers a set of people involved in various films likely to be highlighted in the awards season, and just allows them to talk about making movies. They can be pretty great, especially since one byproduct of awards season is a tendency to talk about superficialities rather than substance, and these talks can really dig into the meat of making movies.

Briefly: We knew more or less the window in which George Clooney‘s new film The Monuments Men would be released after being delayed from a December opening this year. In an interview given just after the detail, Clooney said “We had a meeting with all the effects guys for our CGI stuff, and, we’re just not going to get there in time. Then we looked at the date we had, December 18. I don’t know how many movies are opening, but it’s got to be the toughest December in recent memory for box office. We said, where’s another good place to land? And we looked at February and the Shutter Island slot.”

Now February 7 has been announced as the official new date for the film. That’s the date on which RoboCop was going to open, and Sony has pushed that a few days, to February 12. That leaves The Lego Movie as Clooney’s chief competition. And while we’re at it, David O. Russell’s American Hustle will now open wide on December 18 after a limited opening on December 13 this year. That puts it out a week earlier than the planned Christmas Day date.

Each year, the studios stuff the last two months with awards season hopefuls, and each year, a few decide to back down before we get actually there. Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Streets seems likely to cling to 2013 — barely — but Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher and Olivier Dahan’s Grace of Monaco have already shifted to 2014, and now George Clooney‘s Monuments Men is following suit. Find out why after the jump.

Update: Clooney has spoken up about the delay in greater details. Read his quotes below.

There’s a hell of a lot of great stuff in this second trailer for The Monuments Men. Start with George Clooney and Matt Damon building an “Ocean’s Eleven in WWII” squad to preserve and recover art stolen by the Nazis, and add guys like Bill Murray, John Goodman and Bob Balaban as members of the squad. But I think Cate Blanchett gets the win here, with her super droll question: “how can I help you steal our stolen art?”

Check out the full trailer for the December release below. Read More »

For years we’ve heard that Alfonso Cuarón, director of Children of Men, wanted to make a space-set film like no other. Gravity has been the subject of rumor almost from the start, about how it would feature a very long unbroken “shot” as its opening sequence, about how a mixture of practical photography and CG would be combined to create an immersive and realistic vision of being stranded in space.

Unlike most rumors, most of the ones about Gravity were true. The film follows two astronauts, played by George Clooney and Sandra Bullock, and tracks Bullock’s character as a fairly routine spacewalk turns to disaster. It was shot with unusual methods and features an atypical soundtrack to create the sensation of being in space. And the general reaction to the 3D in the film has been very enthusiastic, especially when seen in IMAX. Our contributor Laremy Legel loved the film in Toronto, and now you have the chance to see it for yourself. So let us know; what did you think about Gravity? Read More »